Auss Abbood

I am Auss, a first-gen immigrant from Iraq, a cognitive scientist by training, sports enthusiast, and bassist. Since October 2024, I have been a PhD student with Prof Nigel Collier at the Language Technology Lab. There, I explore temporal reasoning in large language models (LLMs). I am particularly interested in utilising metacognition in LLMs to better understand temporal reasoning, identify failure modes, and improve performance on tasks that require a mix of skills.

Before my PhD, I have been working as a data scientist at the Robert Koch Institute informing political and medical stakeholders. There, I have been working on early detection of infectious diseases using natural language processing and time series analysis. I was in the founding team that developed Germany’s first surveillance system for intensive care unit capacities, the DIVI-Intensivregister. Later, I was responsible to track international outbreak situations, using epidemic modelling and data analyses. Outside of Germany, I worked on capacity building in digital epidemiology in Southern Africa and Central Asia.